MaryLupin wrote:To tell the truth I don't have much use for Sartre. Most of existentialism seems a bit silly to me. I know that puts up backs all around, but there it is.
I thought
Being and Nothingness was a weak pastiche on
Being and Time. Sartre's argument that only the present moment exists is logically absurd.
As for the eternal thing...I may need to think on that a bit more when it comes to Heidegger but it seems to me that where he differs from Husserl's notion of an absolute subjectivity and Heidegger's Dasein is the focus is the emphasis on material context for its meaning. Dasein seems to me to depend entirely for its expression on things like work and living in a way Husserl's absolute subjectivity does not. I see this a movement away from the absolute as we tend to view it in the West. To be honest it is a bit like the difference between Plato and Aristotle when it came to the idea of Form. Whereas Plato saw Form as the 'really real' and materially different (if you can pardon the pun) from matter, Aristotle granted Form's existence but made it inextricably linked to matter for its expression. I think Eco would lump with Aristotle on this and Heidegger on the question of how a human being can express his authentic Dasein.
Husserl's
Ideas and
Cartesian Meditations analyse the relation between the knowledge and the known as noesis and noema. Hmmm... You are right that Heidegger brings context into Husserl's abstract phenomenology. Dasein also includes a relation to the eternal, through an atheist approach to incarnation. Heidegger is looking for new absolutes, and this is where his focus on Parmenides and the one is so crucial. Eco's proxy Baskerville is totally Aristotelian. Rather like Sherlock Holmes' indifference to cosmology.
And as for poetry, I would disagree that poetry points toward the "eternal." I think that the West thinks of poetry that way to a very large extent, but that, of course, doesn't mean it is correct. Poetry does a lot of things. It reaches into the unconscious, it links feeling and words in very conspicuous and overt ways, it pushes words to the limits of their intelligibility therefore opening an aware doorway into the creative aspects of our being. It does all of these things and more as a function of who we are as animals living in this kind of world. None of that is eternal except in the limited sense that it is part of our nature and so it is as eternal as we are. All that means is that we don't know any different since it has been with us for the length of our awareness. I think that is probably as far as we can push the notion of eternal qualities to which poetry has access.
Maybe what I meant was that I like poetry that has a timeless quality, pointing to permanent ideas that are somehow outside time. The risk is that we seen something as timeless when it is strongly temporally bound, as for example Heidegger's reading of Holderlin, or the attitudes of the Roman church mocked by Eco.
All of this discussion makes me think of Eco and what he was saying by making Aristotle's lost book about laughter and the various ways in which the characters and we the readers respond to that possibility. I mean it is one thing to equate the Master Aristotle with a study of tragedy (I mean that's serious stuff right), but to study laughter? I can understand why Jorge poisons the ink, and why he feels that such a treatise from Aristotle could spell ruin for the church. But for me, what really empowers Eco's book, is not the dynamic between humanism and a theological society, it is the response we as contemporary readers have. It is our interpretation that really matters since we are alive. And to be frank much is still the same. Our discussion is evidence of this I suspect.
Laughter represents modernity while tragedy represents tradition. Eco is finding the Renaissance figures, I'm thinking Pico, Galileo and Bruno, in Aristotle in a way that was anathema to the popes. He is uncovering the suppressed Promethean side of Aristotle.
Still, regardless of the maintenance of old divisions between those who place an eternal in the center of the universe and those who place flux there, what really matters is that Aristotle's book on laughter still provokes a multitude of interpretations while being universally (well as far as humans go anyway) compelling. This is the point of the library I think. It is that which will always draw us in; it is the bell which causes us all to salivate at its sound. But once we get in, then we fall apart along old interpretive lines and for the most part don't even realize we are doing it. Which, for me, is something to laugh about.
Laughter can be from sarcasm, delight, irony, mockery, buffoonery, etc. Apparently Aristotle thought that laughter is what separates us from the beasts, and that a baby does not have a soul, until the moment it laughs for the first time.
RT